His small smile was also dry. “No, I’m strictly eastern,” he said. “Boston area.”
“Don’t know Boston,” I said. “I grew up in New Jersey.”
Fernando de Paula said, “Leon and I went to college together in Boston.”
“Fernando was premed,” Kaplan explained, “and so was I for the first year.”
Fernando, who had a robust man’s robust voice, now gave a robust laugh. “Then he got smart,” he said, “and switched to business.”
“Ah,” I said. “And are you in business now, Mr. Kaplan?”
“Leon, please,” he said.
“And I’m Keith,” I lied.
Fernando said, “Leon’s an investigator.”
I raised an interested eyebrow. “Investigator? With the police, you mean?”
“Insurance,” my new friend Leon said, and my chardonnay arrived.
“Like Double Indemnity,” I said, and lifted my glass with a hand that didn’t shake even the tiniest bit. “Cheers,” I said to the table.
We all toasted one another, I tasted the chardonnay, and Leon said, “Not that glamorous. Usually, it’s pretty boring.”
“But not this time,” Fernando said.
Leon smiled his small dry smile, pleased with himself. “No, not this time.”
“The truth is,” Señora de Paula said, “Leon is just wonderful at catching the bad boys. And the reason he’s wonderful is, he’s a bad boy himself.” And she shook a mock-chiding finger at Kaplan as he smirked.
Fernando said, “Oh, now, Dulce, that isn’t fair. Leon was just a little wild in the old days, that’s all.” To me, smiling, trying to come across like a man with secrets, he said, “I confess I was a little wild myself, at one time.”
“But Leon, and he knows this is true,” Señora de Paula said, “had a real talent for deviltry. I’m sometimes surprised he switched sides.”
Kaplan, grinning, said, “Maybe I was just never given a good enough offer on the other side.”
“That’s probably true,” she agreed, now mock-solemn, and said to me, “That’s why he’s so good at catching the crooks, because he can think like them.”
I couldn’t help saying, “Is that true, Leon? Can you think like a crook?”
“I’ve had my successes,” Kaplan admitted modestly.
“And he’s about to have another one,” Fernando said, “right here in Guerrera.”
Señora de Paula said, “Tell him about it, Leon, I know he’ll be interested. He’s in the film business in Los Angeles.”
Leon raised his eyebrows, intrigued. “Are you?”
“On the production side,” I said. “Also not that glamorous. But Dulce told me you had some sort of interesting reason for being in Guerrera.”
“It wasn’t even supposed to be my file,” Leon said. “But then I saw it was Guerrera, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I have an old friend down there; this is a chance to visit.’ So I got the folder, and here I am.”
“That’s terrific,” I said. “What is this folder?”
“It’s an accidental death, a life insurance claim,” he told me. “I’m with Hartford National, and we’ve had a number of these the last few years. You mentioned Double Indemnity. They really killed the husband in that one, but what we’ve been getting is the people who fake their deaths.”
I said, “They can do that?”
“They can try,” he said. “If they feel they need the money bad enough, they’ll go for it. Not all of them are smart, or they wouldn’t be in so much trouble in the first place.”
“You’re right about that,” I said.
“A lot of them forget,” he explained, “that they have to go on being somebody after it’s all over. It isn’t enough to fake a death and get a death certificate and all that. They have to find a brand new ID somewhere.”
“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do that,” I said.
“Some know,” he told me. “And I think we’ve got one now.”
“And that’s why you’re here.”
“We’ve had a claim on a person — I can’t mention names, of course.”
“Of course.”
“It looked straightforward,” he said. “Accidental death, so it is double indemnity, and quite a lot of money.”
“But it’s a fake?”
“To tell you the truth, I can’t be sure, not yet.” Leon shook his head. “If it weren’t for the letter, we wouldn’t have had any question at all.”
Politely curious, I said, “Letter?”
“Let me explain. These days, the majority of the life insurance fraud cases we get come from offshore. A country like this, or a country in Africa, say, or other parts of the world, the recordkeeping isn’t that exact. It’s maybe a little easier to get a death certificate.”
“Not in my hospital,” Fernando said.
“I know, Fernando,” Leon assured him, “but not everybody is as scrupulous as you people.”
“You mentioned a letter,” I said.
“Well, before that,” he said, “we’d already done the usual check. Any time there’s an offshore death and a large-figure payout, we look to see if there’s anything that doesn’t seem right, and we did it in this instance, and it seemed as though fraud wasn’t even remotely a possibility. The circumstances were open and unimpeachable.”
“And yet,” I said, “here you are.”
“One week after the claim was put in,” he told me, “in fact, just at the moment the payout was being approved, a letter arrived at the national police station in San Cristobal. Now, if Fernando will forgive me, the post office in this country isn’t the greatest.”
“Believe me, I know,” Fernando said, and his wife said, “We beg people, Fax us the dates of your stay. Don’t write.”
“I’ve heard it said,” Leon told me with his dry smile, “that the post office here is nothing to write home about.”
“I’ve heard that about the mail here,” I agreed. But I was thinking, Get on with it, man. What the hell is this letter?
“So the letter,” Leon said, “had been mailed more than a month earlier. It got screwed up in the postal system, but then finally it did get to the police.”
“And what did it say?”
“It said our client was planning to stage a fake death, in order to defraud our company. It said the letter writer’s husband was involved in the plot, even though the letter writer had begged him to have nothing to do with it. It asked the police to warn our client that his plans were known, in order to force him to give up the whole idea.” He spread his hands. “You see? The letter was written a month before our client’s alleged death, but it wasn’t found until after the death — if it really was a death — had already occurred.”
I said, “Do you know who the letter writer is?”
“No. Some disgruntled wife. She doesn’t matter, and her husband doesn’t matter. In fact, the client doesn’t matter, if he’s still alive someplace.”
“He doesn’t?” I was distracted, because I did know who the goddamn letter writer was. The angry Ifigenia, the bitch. What had I ever done to her?
Leon was saying, “The widow — or the wife — has put in a claim. If I can establish fraud while I’m here, that lady is going to jail.”
“Won’t that be easy to do?”
“You’d think so,” he said. “Once we’re on the trail. But the circumstances are just so solid. It was an automobile accident, seen by a restaurant full of people, none of whom knew our client. It was a local mortician, who also did not know our client. There’s even a videotape of the funeral, believe it or not, with grieving family members. I’ve been to the cemetery, and the grave is there. I’ve talked to the mortician who wrote the death certificate, and he described the body, and it would seem to be the right man. I’ve visited the stonemason, and the headstone is being carved right now.”